Hi guys, I’m looking for help or ideas on how to make ridges on a modulation wheel. They have to be pretty small (like the picture) I tried the follow me tool but it said no valid surface or something. I’d appreciate any help or ideas you can share. thanks in advance.
The model is just oversized for now.
Mod-wheel.skp (1.2 MB)
Use the array-tool ! I did it with the big ridge. Try it with smaller ridges. I can send You pictures or the model (or stl-file) when I know how to do (i am verry new here).
I would start with a fine toothed gear, then chop the tops off the teeth with an appropriately thick walled cylinder.
Try the gear plugin. For how to use watch this video
I don’t believe the gear plugin will give the shape you need for the ridges. As @miller mentioned, make a radial array. draw the shape of a ridge and use Copy Rotate to copy it around the wheel.
I didn’t draw the correct shape for the ridge but hopefully this gives you an idea.
I made the ridge a component before copying it to make it easier to handle.
After rotating the first copy, hit Enter and then xn where n is the number of copies. You can calculate how many you need or just try different values for n until you get them. For mine, 81 worked.
Afterward the ridge components would be exploded and there’s be some clean up to do.
It would probably be easier to do this on a 2D drawing of the wheel and use Push/Pull to extrude it after you have the entire profile made. There’d be less cleanup to do and fewer steps overall.
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If you don’t have any specific data for doing the teeth just follow your geometry. Otherwise you need some better calculations and geometry.
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Dave, thanks for Your last sentence ! I had to ciean more then 120 lines because the big ridge fits 60 times in that angle.
If this part functions as a gear, @atek’s suggestion to use a gear plugin looks like this with 64 teeth each side:
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Nobody has suggested using a circle with the correct number of segments so you can pull one out, shape it and array it.
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Thanks for all your suggestions guys! I had a feeling there was a tool for doing this but it was late last night and could not think of the array tool. Will get working on this. thanks again